VIII

  In five years he will be free. Already he has forgiven us our sins and is willing to stay and help us. But the Government says, ‘no.’ The Black [Typescript ends here.]

  The Ten Commandments of Charm

  “For when a woman is perfectly frank with men, they do not rise up and bless her. Nay, they rise up and run!”

  “And what woman can be happy and likewise neglected?”

  Be cheerful. Let not thy smile come off. For a joyous damsel is a bright light in a dismal world; and a man will pass up long eyelashes and a short temper for a damsel that is long on laughter and short on complaints.

  Show not thine hand to any man; neither tell him the truth. For a little mystery is better than much wit. And unto a man every woman is a brand new puzzle wherein he loseth interest when he has found the “answer.”

  Forget not the first law of conversation, which is, Thou shalt not talk about thyself; nor the last law, which is, Help every man to express himself brilliantly! Thus shalt thou be accounted a “fascinating conversationalist,” though thou utterest not a single word.

  I charge thee, avoid the telephone as thou wouldst the plague. For a woman that pursueth a man with telephone calls affecteth him like unto five meals a day. She causes him sentimental indigestion. She is as lobster after the dessert.

  Beware the temptation of the inkwell. For a woman that delugeth a man with letters and perfumed notes shall be called “pest”; and she that singeth the song of her soul in fourteen pages shall be named “Anathenia.” Verily it requireth six men all very much in love to write as many letters as one damsel who is only a little in love.

  Thou shalt not ask questions. For curiosity concerning a man’s comings and his goings and his stayings away is a hobble on the feet of Love. And when suspicion en[t]ereth at the door, love flyeth out thru the transom.

  Remember a man’s vanity to keep it nourished. For every criticism from the lips of a woman is an arrow aimed at love; but in the matter of swallowing raw compliments and lumps of flattery, every man (and likewise every woman) is an ostrich! And he that departeth full of self-admiration will come back for more.

  Hold thyself not cheap. For difficulty is the spice of love; and peradventure the colder the wind thou blowest upon a man’s heart, the higher thou fannest the flame of his ardor. A little indifference is a wonderful thing.

  Charm a man if thou canst, comfort him if thou wilt but above all amuse him! For a man who is bored will turn away from Venus herself, to play with a little brown elf who can make him laugh!1 And she who playeth all his game with skill shall be an easy winner in the Game of Hearts.

  Whatsoever thou doest, forget not thy femininity. For what profiteth it a damsel though she learneth to box, and driveth her own car and carryth her own golf clubs, if she hath forgotten how to blush, to cling and to coquette a little? Yea, be not too independent!

  Noses

  “All of which goes to prove that there are noses and noses,” Mark Antony remarked to Cleopatra one day when it was 99 in the shade, “and even you, perfect one, have a nose.” And Mark was right, there are several noses extant, and Cleopatra did have one, too.

  In fact, from our first ancestor to the present, the nasal lump has persisted on the human face. The Merchants and Miners’ Union declare there are enough noses in existance to supply the present population, in fact they claim that the present supply is inexhaustible. How many men, if they told the truth, would admit they had arrived at success by merely following their noses.

  The uses of the noses are as varied as their looks. They are, (1) To separate the eyes; (2) to keep the lips from running up to the forehead; (3) to wear powder—yea Coty’s. Rigaud, Hudnut’s, ye do well to tremble before the mighty beak; were it not for glistening proboscis, thy traffic ne’er had been1—(4) to whiff and locate one’s food; (5) to administer the snub; and no snub is so snubbish as the snub administered by the proper organ of snubbing. I observe a great stir among the ladies of l’haut monde for if there were no noses, there would be no snubs and with no snubs there would be no society.

  The kinds of noses: (1) Roman nose; like all Gaul is divided into three parts—the start, the bend and the drop; it is a conquering nose, it hastens around the world accompanied by a sword. (2) Anglo-Saxon nose, brother to the Roman nose, is usually wedged in between blue eyes: a snoopy, b[o]ssy nose, a conquest seeking snout, loves to make laws for other people to obey. (3) Greek nose; straight and classic leads directly to the divorce court. Helen of Troy—“The face that launched a thousand ships” (?) [sic]. Nix, the nose. (4) Now pause we before the nasal appendage of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. This is a refulgent nose, a bounteous nose that “droppeth like the dew from heaven” onto the lips beneath and leads straight to Wall Street. (5) At last we stand before the nose of Ethiopia. No lucre loving beak is this, no conquest seeking snout; a nose that squats calmly upon its face, singing and dreaming and dreaming and singing ad infinitum.

  From all these things it can be seen that noses are necessary. I need not plead with you more to keep them, be kind to your nose, make a pal of it, take it everywhere with you. Let us have a rising vote—“Ah, the nose have it!” Let us adjourn.

  How It Feels to Be Colored Me

  I am colored but I offer nothing in the way of extenuating circumstances except the fact that I am the only Negro in the United States whose grandfather on the mother’s side was not an Indian chief.

  I remember the very day that I became colored. Up to my thirteenth year I lived in the little Negro town of Eatonville, Florida. It is exclusively a colored town. The only white people I knew passed through the town going to or coming from Orlando. The native whites rode dusty horses, the Northern tourists chugged down the sandy village road in automobiles. The town knew the Southerners and never stopped cane chewing when they passed. But the Northerners were something else again. They were peered at cautiously from behind curtains by the timid. The more venturesome would come out on the porch to watch them go past and got just as much pleasure out of the tourists as the tourists got out of the village.

  The front porch might seem a daring place for the rest of the town, but it was a gallery seat to me. My favorite place was atop the gate-post. Proscenium box for a born first-nighter. Not only did I enjoy the show, but I didn’t mind the actors knowing that I liked it. I usually spoke to them in passing. I’d wave at them and when they returned my salute, I would say something like this: “Howdy-do-well-I-thank-you-where-you-goin’?” Usually automobile or the horse paused at this, and after a queer exchange of compliments, I would probably “go a piece of the way” with them, as we say in farthest Florida. If one of my family happened to come to the front in time to see me, of course negotiations would be rudely broken off. But even so, it is clear that I was the first “welcome-to-our-state” Floridian, and I hope the Miami Chamber of Commerce will please take notice.

  During this period, white people differed from colored to me only in that they rode through town and never lived there. They liked to hear me “speak pieces” and sing and wanted to see me dance the parse-me-la, and gave me generously of their small silver for doing these things, which seemed strange to me for I wanted to do them so much that I needed bribing to stop. Only they didn’t know it. The colored people gave no dimes. They deplored any joyful tendencies in me, but I was their Zora nevertheless. I belonged to them, to the nearby hotels, to the county—everybody’s Zora.

  But changes came in the family when I was thirteen, and I was sent to school in Jacksonville. I left Eatonville, the town of the oleanders, as Zora. When I disembarked from the river-boat at Jacksonville, she was no more. It seemed that I had suffered a sea change. I was not Zora of Orange County any more, I was now a little colored girl. I found it out in certain ways. In my heart as well as in the mirror, I became a fast brown—warranted not to rub nor run.

  But I am not tragically colored. There is no great sorrow dammed up in my soul, nor lurking behind my eyes. I do not mind at all. I do not belong to the sobbing school of Negrohood who hold that nature somehow has given them a lowdown dirty deal and whose feelings are all hurt about it. Even in the helter-skelter skirmish that is my life, I have seen that the world is to the strong regardless of a little pigmentation more or less. No, I do not weep at the world—I am too busy sharpening my oyster knife.

  Someone is always at my elbow reminding me that I am the granddaughter of slaves. It fails to register depression with me. Slavery is sixty years in the past. The operation was successful and the patient is doing well, thank you. The terrible struggle that made me an American out of a potential slave said, “On the line!” The Reconstruction said, “Get set!”; and the generation before said, “Go!” I am off to a flying start and I must not halt in the stretch to look behind and weep. Slavery is the price I paid for civilization, and the choice was not with me. It is a bully adventure and worth all that I have paid through my ancestors for it. No one on earth ever had a greater chance for glory. The world to be won and nothing to be lost. It is thrilling to think—to know that for any act of mine, I shall get twice as much praise or twice as much blame. It is quite exciting to hold the center of the national stage, with the spectators not knowing whether to laugh or to weep.

  The position of my white neighbor is much more difficult. No brown specter pulls up a chair beside me when I sit down to eat. No dark ghost thrusts its leg against mine in bed. The game of keeping what one has is never so exciting as the game of getting.

  I do not always feel colored. Even now I often achieve the unconscious Zora of Eatonville before the Hegira.1 I feel most colored when I am thrown against a sharp white background.

  For instance at Barnard.2 “Beside the waters of the Hudson” I feel my race. Among the thousand white persons, I am a dark rock surged upon, overswept by a creamy sea. I am surged upon and overswept, but through it all, I remain myself. When covered by the waters, I am; and the ebb but reveals me again.

  Sometimes it is the other way around. A white person is set down in our midst, but the contrast is just as sharp for me. For instance, when I sit in the drafty basement that is The New World Cabaret with a white person, my color comes. We enter chatting about any little nothing that we have in common and are seated by the jazz waiters. In the abrupt way that jazz orchestras have, this one plunges into a number. It loses no time in circumlocutions, but gets right down to business. It constricts the thorax and splits the heart with its tempo and narcotic harmonies. This orchestra grows rambunctious, rears on its hind legs and attacks the tonal veil with primitive fury, rending it, clawing it until it breaks through to the jungle beyond. I follow those heathen[s]—follow them exultingly. I dance wildly inside myself; I yell within, I whoop; I shake my assegai above my head, I hurl it true to the mark yeeeeooww! I am in the jungle and living in the jungle way. My face is painted red and yellow and my body is painted blue. My pulse is throbbing like a war drum. I want to slaughter something—give pain, give death to what, I do not know. But the piece ends. The men of the orchestra wipe their lips and rest their fingers. I creep back slowly to the veneer we call civilization with the last tone and find the white friend sitting motionless in his seat, smoking calmly.

  “Good music they have here,” he remarks, drumming the table with his fingertips.

  Music! The great blobs of purple and red emotion have not touched him. He has only heard what I felt. He is far away and I see him but dimly across the ocean and the continent that have fallen between us. He is so pale with his whiteness then and I am so colored.

  At certain times I have no race, I am me. When I set my hat at a certain angle and saunter down Seventh Avenue, Harlem City, feeling as snooty as the lions in front of the Forty-Second Street Library, for instance. So far as my feelings are concerned, Peggy Hopkins Joyce on the Boule Mich with her gorgeous raiment, stately carriage, knees knocking together in the most aristocratic manner, has nothing on me.3 The cosmic Zora emerges. I belong to no race nor time. I am the eternal feminine with its string of beads.

  I have no separate feeling about being an American citizen and colored. I am merely a fragment of the Great Soul that surges within the boundaries. My country, right or wrong.

  Sometimes, I feel discriminated against, but it does not make me angry. It merely astonishes me. How can any deny themselves the pleasure of my company! It’s beyond me.

  But in the main, I feel like a brown bag of miscellany propped against a wall. Against a wall in company with other bags, white, red and yellow. Pour out the contents, and there is discovered a jumble of small things priceless and worthless. A first-water diamond, an empty spool, bits of broken glass, lengths of string, a key to a door long since crumbled away, a rusty knife-blade, old shoes saved for a road that never was and never will be, a nail bent under the weight of things too heavy for any nail, a dried flower or two, still a little fragrant. In your hand is the brown bag. On the ground before you is the jumble it held—so much like the jumble in the bags, could they be emptied, that all might be dumped in a single heap and the bags refilled without altering the content of any greatly. A bit of colored glass more or less would not matter. Perhaps that is how the Great Stuffer of Bags willed them in the first place—who knows?

  Race Cannot Become Great Until It Recognizes Its Talent

  Thinking about this sun-burst of Negro art that is going to do so much for America and the world in general, reminds me of a story.

  It wasn’t told to me but I heard that one time a Negro from Longwood, Florida, was over-persuaded to go up to Jacksonville on a trip. He got off the train and went on down to Bay Street to Main. He got there and stood and looked at all the tall houses and the traffic and his mouth fell open and he said, “Well, if the world is any bigger than this, I don’t want to see it.”

  Which means nothing except it be to point out that human beings change their concepts slowly, and the Negroes of America are not exceptional along those lines.

  We hear a great deal these days about culture and in that connection the name of William Shakespeare is certain to be mentioned, so I might just as well drag it in. Along in 1066 William, the Conqueror, fell upon England and conquered it. He was a thorough man. He enslaved the British and put iron collars around their necks—the beginning of a serfdom that lasted many centuries. It wasn’t that the iron collars were so enduring but the effect of the mastery that the collars represented. The English mind got the habit of looking up to the Norman conquerors. People slaved and starved in English, but dined and took all pleasures strictly in French. It required nearly five hundred years for an Englishman to regain enough self-respect to consider beauty of any kind except in Norman form and Norman terms. Being English never came into fashion before the reigns of that doughty Welsh family known as the Tudors.

  And, of course, nobody dreamed of writing a line of literature in the dialect of the licked and lowly Englishman. Any thought worth its salt had to be embalmed in French or Latin. French because it was the language of conquerors, it being held that the language of such valiant men with swell biting steel must of necessity be beautiful. And there was corporal as well as intellectual power behind that Latin too.

  CHAUCER DIFFERENT

  Until Chaucer; he saw the beauty of his own language in spite of the scorn in which it was held and he used it as a mold for his immortal “Canterbury Tales.” It is a long time between Chaucer and Shakespeare, but in spite of that, in spite of the enhanced prestige of the nation generally, the memory of the iron collar was still strong enough to cause the majority of persons who affected literature in England to prefer the florid, continental elegance of Ben Jonson to the greater genius of the more natural and universal Shakespeare. He was despised for the very qualities that have made him immortal. Shakespeare the man, who quickly grew through his callow, imitative, period and settled down to his labors of shedding so great a radiance upon English history and folk-lore that he must live as long as civilization. Yes, folk-lore. Sprites, fairies, Puck, Caliban, Twelfth Night celebrations, Mid-Summer’s Night observances are just as much a part of English folk-lore and folk ways as Hoodoo practices and Brer Rabbit are a part Aframerican folk ways.1

  Now we stand in America where the English stood in the days of Chaucer, physically but not spiritually free, unable as yet to turn our eyes from the distorted looking glass that goes with the iron collar, thinking like the man from Longwood—if we can reach the Jacksonville of the white man’s degrees and language, that the world can hold nothing more. Provincial and fanatic! Who knows [w]hat fabulous cities of artistic concepts lie within the mind and language of some humble Negro boy or girl who has never heard tell of Ibsen, for instance?

  WE LYNCH ORIGINAL THOUGHT

  We cry out against the ignorance and barbarities in the South that we say bar our way to the heights. But why go so far afield? Stop, at home and consider. The fiendish murder of Claude Neal in Florida was a monstrous thing.2 A man was ravished out of life in the most heartless manner. But he is one man. And while we are in the chamber of horrors let us take another look. How about the intellectual lynching we perpetrate upon ourselves? Let any Negro do anything but pat himself on the back for being almost just like a white person or if that cannot be achieved, almost like someone who is almost like someone who almost acts like a white person and the cliche who got nothing out of college but a degree seize the rope and faggot and make for the nearest tree, discouraging original thought in thousands of immature Negro minds. And that is the tragedy. The world’s most powerful force is intellect. The only reality is thought.